Sphero, known for its line of robotic balls and droids, today launched the $50 Sphero Mini, the company's most affordable toy yet.
Sphero Mini measures in at about 1.25 inches, making it similar in size to a ping pong ball. It's essentially a tiny version of the original Sphero robotic ball, and it's controlled the same way -- through an app on your iPhone.
The Sphero Mini connects to an iPhone using Bluetooth and can be used for playing games, learning to code, playing with pets, and more, thanks to a built-in gyroscope, accelerometer, and LED light.
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Sphero has designed a series of games that use the Mini as a controller mechanism, and with a future update, it will be programmable using the Sphero Edu app. Unique to the Mini is a Face Drive app feature that lets it be controlled via head movements and facial expressions.
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Sphero Mini can glow in millions of colors with the LED lights, and it has a range of 10 meters. The battery in the Sphero Mini lasts for 45 minutes before needing to be recharged, and charging takes an hour. There are also interchangeable shells in a range of colors that can be purchased for the Mini, as well as a pins and cones accessory pack.
Sphero Mini can be purchased from the Sphero website for $49.99.
Top Rated Comments
So this model does NOT work with Swift Playgrounds. I was thinking this would be a really cheap way to buy a bunch of Sphero's for all my young relatives to code against with Swift but to get that integration requires the Sphere SPRK+ which is $130 rather than $50. They may have succeeded in getting my attention long enough to make the upsell in this case though :p
I had the same thought and went searching for more info. I came upon this article ('http://www.smh.com.au/technology/gadgets-on-the-go/sphero-gets-back-to-basics-with-80-mini-robot-20170928-gyr30w.html') which claims Swift Playgrounds support is coming.Just in case anyone was thinking of Swift Playgrounds as I was.